OR12: Open Repositories in Edinburgh : OER and Institutional Repositories

Marvin Reimer, Ying Jin and I were recently in Edinburgh giving a workshop and talk related to our work with SWORD and OER. We have an extension called OERPub that adds defined metadata and specific mechanisms for making new versions and new derived copies of content using the Dublin Core metadata fields.

The party on Wednesday at the Edinburgh Museum.

The Open Repositories conference last year (2011) is where Ross Reedstrom and I confirmed SWORD as a great way to get a publishing API for OER. We went to the workshop given by Richard Jones and Stuart Lewis and also managed to snag Stuart as a reviewer on our extension and first server and client implementation.

The meeting this year was focused mainly on the academic community that builds, uses, and extends repositories like DSpace, Fedora, and EPrints. The focus is on Institutional Repositories and the archiving and preservation of scholarly works. In some sense, our OER work is an outlier at the conference, but it fits in well with the learning repositories supported by JISC, JORUM, and Open University's Lab Spaces.

We gave a workshop on depositing to Institutional Repositories and OER repositories at the same time using SWORD and OERPub. Faculty authors of textbooks, courses, and, educational journals fit nicely into both worlds. The presentation we gave reviewed the motivations and use cases and we also provided a handout to get started technically. During the main conference, Marvin and I presented an overview of the extensions to SWORD to support OER.

Fast forward to minute 55 to see me describing the OERPUB API or view the slides on slideshare.

One of the projects we found especially interesting from the conference was the Edina Repository Junction Broker. The RJ Broker is designed to help scholarly publishing houses archive authors' copies at their respective institutions, but it would be a really nice way to do IR deposits of OER also. We could hook RJ Broker into our client and then allow authors to archive their textbooks and courses at their institutional repositories through RJ Broker.